Racing like it's 1989

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About the site

Welcome to Highway Forever, the arcade racing blog.

This is a site for me (LlamaFIL) and maybe a few special friends to talk about the arcade racing genre. There’ll be reviews, videos and maybe other stuff. Although principally about games released in the arcades I’ll also be covering games considered “arcade-style”; that is to say, games not considered driving simulations. Although this itself may prove problematic as genre boundaries shift and merge, but I will try my best to stay on point.

Because I tend to start projects like this and let them die after a while I’ll be setting myself a few guidelines for updating this blog. I’ll be running this site until at least the end of 2015 and I will add content a minimum of once a month, ideally twice or more. At the end of the year I’ll decide if it’s worth continuing based on how much I like what I’ve done, if I have any material left to use and how much time I have to keep updating it.

About me

I’m FIL and I’m a life long arcade gaming fan. Being born in the mid-80s, I was lucky enough to grow up in a time when arcades still existed, albeit when they were in decline. Although I lived quite close to the seaside, the traditional home of arcades in the UK, actually getting to play the machines was a rare treat and one which left me with some great memories of being wowed by the sights and sounds of games that back then you simply couldn’t play properly at home. As good as many of the home ports of these games were, consoles and computers of the day simply couldn’t match the performance of the dedicated hardware they were attempting to recreate.

Among the many games that I played back then it was the racing games that were perhaps the most special for me. Getting to sit inside the big dedicated cabinets that racers so often had, was a very exciting prospect for somebody the best part of a decade away from being old enough to drive a real car. Whenever I stepped through the door of an arcade I’d instantly be on the lookout for games like Virtua Racing, Suzuka 8 Hours or Rad Mobile, these were my go-to games back then and when it was time to go home I’d always leave happy if i’d managed to play one of them.

Today as an adult I still enjoy the arcade racing genre as part of a varied gaming diet. Although there aren’t very many pure arcade-style games being made these days, emulation and re-releases have meant that I still have access to many of my old favourites. I’m not a competition standard player by any means but I can give my friends a good run for their money in Mario Kart 8. Maybe if this site takes off I’ll have a few more folks to race against.